#singerseal

Three-time Grammy winner Seal, who was to perform with Aaliyah in October, is devastated by the death of the rising R&B; star.

He met her just two weeks ago, when they got together to talk about which songs to perform at an Oct. 27 breast cancer benefit at the Greek Theatre. “You meet and touch somebody and then, two weeks later, they’re dead. I kept thinking: ‘It’s just a dream. I’m going to wake up in a bit.’ But she isn’t here,” Seal said. “It’s really sad. She was so young and with such a promising future.”

Aaliyah was returning from a video shoot in the Bahamas when her plane crashed on Saturday, killing her and eight others. Seal heard the news Saturday night when a friend left a phone message, saying Aaliyah had been in an accident. “I thought she had survived. It didn’t dawn upon me that she was actually dead. It was devastating,” he said.

At the October benefit, Seal plans to perform with Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind, who will co-produce the concert with Step Up Women’s Network. The money raised will be donated in Aaliyah’s name to the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center and New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Jenkins told us Aaliyah’s death “made me cry like a baby.”